A road of pilgrims once climbed from here to a shrine at the peak. The stair fell. The gods it sought are gone. Only the town at its foot endures.
The Enduring Lesser Lights came at last to Ulmira’s Step, and found it built in the bones of a titan — a skull, a ruined fortress, ribs and plates of armor set into the mountainside — the first stair of a pilgrimage road that had once climbed to a shrine at the peak, before the collapse buried the rest of the steps. Giants had raised it; dwarves and humans came after; it kept its own tongue, Lammat, and its own ways. Sylvie named the shadow that still crossed the sky in the local word — the Askavir — and told them to tread lightly. This was their ground, she said, not the party’s.
Across the bridge the road’s miasma thinned, and there was laughter, and the smell of bread, and the ring of hammers. Children of giants and dwarves ran in the square. A gong called the town to a common meal, cooked at a great firepit by the giant Kelbar and his teenage hands — bread and stew and smoked meat for the crowd. The Sacred Pyre at the town’s heart kept it warm and free of the miasma. Without it, this place would come to be what Drosven’s Gate would soon be.
Heyou found his own kind at a back table — Syndicate men — and made himself known to Borek, a dwarf who wore a heavy conjoined ring stamped with the Syndicate mark. Borek knew where one of Heyou’s lost limbs had gone, and named his price: the eggs of the Askavir. The great bird does not breed, he said, and yet it lays — and the eggs are rumored to hold the last vestiges of the departed gods. He hung about Heyou’s neck a heavy silver ward-medallion, a snarling figure ringed in metal — no key, only a charm, that the Askavir might not eat him — and loaned improved gear to the whole party besides.
A delving crew came up out of the titan’s tunnels battered, five of the eight or nine who had gone down. Sylvie offered them healing, and was refused — politely, but refused. Their famed guide, the ribbit Tamros, had not come back at all; once, long before, he had gone into those same ruins with the witch Ygva, and found there the thing she carried up the mountain. By the fire Draz set to picking glass shrapnel from the chest and back of a survivor named Mellon, and drove a few shards the deeper for his trouble. Mellon spoke of the tunnel: trapped by a careful hand that reset each snare behind the delvers, a mile and a half gained in a week, men lost and nothing found. He meant to go back better prepared, and would welcome company.
Sylvie sought out Yol, an old giantess who still held a faint spark of Splendor, and learned why her healing was unwelcome. Since the gods left, the town would not suffer Splendor-domain magic — healing among it — as a reminder of what had abandoned them; Yol kept her own spark, and had learned not to use it. She named the present witch Ygva, apprentice to the older witch Oshel, of whom Sylvie had once heard; the moon-rune Jara from Sylvie’s visions was Ygva’s own; and Sarru the pyre-keeper was the one who could point the way. When Sylvie looked up afterward, she felt a piece of the moon drawing slowly nearer — an omen she could not yet read.
Heyou worked a dwarf fence, Gala, for what she knew: the trap-setters below were almost certainly goblins — masters of the snare and the charge — and a people who had once lived and traded down in the dark had fallen silent some twenty years past. At the Sacred Pyre the party found Sarru, a fit and well-kept dwarf, keeper of the flame. She could lead them only as far as she ranged for tinder, and then point the way up to Ygva — and they had best decide what they would pay before they met her, for she had never seen the witch take payment in money. Ygva, she said, had been inseparable from Kelun, an old talking construct-statue from before the gods left. It was Ygva who had learned of the Amber Reach and of magic from the Celsians, and who had studied under Oshel herself.
A climb to Ygva with empty hands would cost them dearly, and it was in the trapped tunnels below that she had first found her own branch. So they chose the dark first — to go down into the titan’s ruins with Mellon’s crew, and win some leverage there, or the Blessed Branch itself, before they ever faced the witch. Above them the town kept its distance, Ygva’s price waited unnamed, the goblins kept the deep, and the Askavir kept the sky.